08 Prove : Assignment
Neural Network Classifier
Objective
Understand Neural Networks, in particular, back-propagation for multi-layer perceptron networks.
This assignment is the culmination of the previous weeks' work.
Instructions
In the previous weeks you should have used a library implementation of a neural network to classify several different datasets of different characteristics.
Your assignment this week is to pick one of the datasets that you found to be fairly challenging to get good results on. Then, using this challenging dataset, spend significant time trying different hyper-parameter combinations, to discover the configuration that gives the best results.
You should consider varying things such as:
Number of layers
Number of nodes per layer
Stopping criteria / length of training time
Using momentum
Using different activation functions
Any other parameters provided by your library
Minimum Standard Requirements
Including the work done in this week and the previous weeks, you should then have completed at a minimum:
Successfully used a library implementation of a neural network to make predictions.
Done the necessary preprocessing work to prepare several different datasets for this library.
Used datasets that show you can work with various kinds of input data (e.g., categorical vs numeric, etc.).
Made predictions using both regression and classification.
Performed significant hyper-parameter experimentation and tuning for a challenging dataset.
Submission
You need to complete a brief report demonstrating your work and the results you obtained. This report should be in PDF format.
Please include the following in your report.
Source code
If your code is stored at GitHub, please provide a link to the public repository. Otherwise, please submit it as a separate file to I-Learn.
Approach
Describe your overall approach to the assignment.
Challenges
Describe the part of the assignment that gave you the most trouble, and how you overcame it.
Results
Make sure to include evidence (description, graphs, results, etc.) that demonstrate each of the items listed in the minimum standards above.
Above and Beyond
Describe any efforts you made to go above and beyond.
Assessment
Please state which category you feel best describes your assignment and give a 1-2 sentence justification for your choice:
1) Some attempt was made
2) Developing, but significantly deficient
3) Slightly deficient, but still mostly adequate
4) Meets requirements
5) Shows creativity and excels above and beyond requirements.
Please note that in order to accommodate the graphs that you will need to have in your write up, this will not be an plain text submission file like the other assignments, but rather, you will upload your own PDF document.